Lieberman, chairman of the Harvard Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, discusses the impact of natural selection and the dynamics of evolution over all those millennia on the bodies we inhabit. In “The Story of the Human Body,” Daniel E. And some evolutionary explanations that seemed dubious then now seem just silly - I am thinking of one that I dimly recall on the evolutionary advantages of joining a sorority to improve your reproductive fitness.īut it was an exciting time to study evolutionary biology, and it certainly left me with a sense of the intellectual challenge of considering how the long time frame of human evolutionary change might or might not explain modern human patterns and problems.
There were battles over notions that seemed radical back then but are now widely accepted - for example, that many aspects of behavior, personality and temperament are strongly affected by genetic tendencies. Wilson published “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” and controversial ideas about health, biology and behavior were fought out in some of my college biology classes. I was an undergraduate in 1975, when E.O.